My grandparents were convinced that if you turned the TV channels too fast, that you would end up breaking the TV. You had to let each channel “set” prior to changing it to the next one. This was true if you changed channels by hand or use the remote (For the remote, one only had the option to scroll through channels, you couldn’t type in “13” to have it turn to channel 13.)
My grandma always made us turn off the TV before vacuuming the floor in front of it. She said the vibrations of the vacuum cleaner would cause something in the TV to break if we left it on.
Well, now that I’ve typed that out it looks crazy. I do still turn off the TV before vacuuming, though.
I seem to remember the Car Talk guys several years back saying it could wear out the air conditioning compressor early (not the engine). I don’t know if it’s an issue with newer vehicles.
Well, you hope he would be.
This sounds like my wife. She’s 41, and she firmly believes that going outside with wet hair will cause you catch a cold. I think it’s something her mother told her. I’ve tried to explain to my beloved that there are these things called “germs” that make you sick, and you get them by being around sick people.
Nope. If you venture outside without waiting for your hair to dry fully, you’re gonna catch a cold. Yes, dear :rolleyes:
When my wife and I moved to Houston, her mom urged us to get in touch with this one other person who lives there who she happened to know. “Maybe she can show you where to get groceries,” etc.
While it won’t keep Alzheimers away, having a higher number of connections between neurons (which doing puzzles, learning another language, learning to play an instrument, etc. will contribute to) will keep Alzheimers from having as great an effect, especially in the early stages. Alzheimers introduces hard plaques that block connections and if you have multiple routes to get from A to B it’s harder for a single plaque to sever the connection.
This is not just true in old age. Educating yourself and gaining skills at any age will help produce a brain that is less affected by early stage Alzheimers. If anyone claims that you gather too much trivia, tell them you’re building neural network redundancy.
There is more than one kind of dementia and, dementia aside, memories that are not reinforced will fade. So I’d add in going through old family pictures, keeping small boxes of souvenirs, and meeting up with distant friends and family to swap stories.
My Grandma* was adamant that there should be no open windows across from each other during a rainstorm because lightning could jump in one window and cross the room to get out the other. But if one window was staggered a yard or so to the side it was OK.
I only discovered this when I went on a vacation with them and we were in a big thunderstorm in Oklahoma in the summer. Rain or not, it was hot, but we could only open a couple of the little camper windows. When I told my Mom about it, back home, Mom said that Grandma had seen the family cat get hit by lightning when she was a child, so she was always fearful during storms. I was glad that I hadn’t argued.
*I had several grandmas, growing up. This is the one that wasn’t Y2K compliant.
Our pre-internet elders worked off of knowledge that was passed to them by their own elders, and from wives’ tales, their own life experiences, etc. I would suspect that people would hear much less of this sort of thing from people. . .well. . .like me, who are active internet users and who fact-check things that don’t sound quite kosher. There is, of course, that large portion of the population who are actively ignorant or willfully stupid, who will continue to pass on bits of misinformation. But like the man said: you can’t fix stupid.
As for the OP’s question, I don’t recall any parental or grand-parental concerns that caused any embarrassment for me, other than my stepfather’s insistence on calling any young man “lad”; it made me cringe.
My grandparents spit can in the car smelled bad and was yucky. They shared the same can on car trips. Mammaw’s snuff and his chewing tobacco required a fresh can lined with paper towel before any car trip.
For an elderly white woman with a majority of close black friends, my grandmother had some real strange ideas about race.
When I was growing up (on the other side of the city), she met one of my elementary school friends (who happened to be black) and asked him if he knew her good friend, Mame. Mame lived over ten miles away and was 60 years older than my friend.
Another time, some of her black friends were talking about a really good barbecue restaurant and my grandmother wanted to check it out. But, not wanting to be in an awkward situation, she called ahead and asked if they served white people. They promptly hung up on her. Thing is, she was honestly wanting to know.
And then, on the other side of the family, my grandfather is somewhat well-known (moreso back in the day, and really only to a particular subset of people). He is a fairly big schmoozer and loves to name-drop. He’d always ask me if I knew people who weren’t geographically relevant to me, and who made their claim to fame before I was even born. Anyway, on more than one occasion, we’d go out to eat and after the server introduced himself, my grandfather would counter with his full name and job title. I really doubt the 17 year old cared, and the rest of us would crack an uneasy smile.
This is the same man who wanted to bring his press packet / biography to Thanksgiving dinner for all the family attendees, when he was going to be having it with the other side of the family some of whom he’d never met.
My father didn’t believe in insurance. He had car insurance because it was required, and health insurance because it was supplied by work, but would never even consider life insurance. I don’t know why he felt this way, but I suspect it had to do with working as a waiter and living paycheck to paycheck.
He also barely took care of cars he owned, but later in life started leasing and fanatically maintained the leased cars. He didn’t want to pay when he turned them in, but to have a car he owned go to pot was A-OK. :smack:
My grandmother had a lifelong aversion to house cats. One time when I was still a kid, we visited a elderly woman, living alone with a Manx cat. She told us the story of finding the cat in a gutter and nursing it slowly back to health. Meanwhile, the still waif-like cat, with a cat’s usual instincts, had identified my grandmother as a cat hater and begun to nuzzle up to her leg. Right in the middle of the woman’s story, the cat came sailing across the living room, hit the ground, and lit off like it had been struck by lightning. My grandmother denied that she had kicked that cat until the day she died. Pushed it with her leg, yes. Kicked, no.
At my high school graduation party my great aunt asked me if I went to school with any colored children, and how I found them to be. I replied that I did and that they were awfully nice people.
She seemed genuinely interested in the answer but said “oh… I guess so, but UGH!!” and then her whole body shuddered the way one might shudder at the thought of sleeping in a haunted house.
My mother (not terribly elderly at the time), used to tell me that women shouldn’t lift heavy things because it might strain their lady-parts.
She was another of those “wet hair outside is a death sentence” types.
Well, I’d certainly do this if I could, because the car would stay cleaner between washings. Un-sheltered parking at home is the suck.
This was around 1990
My one grandmother would not wash her drinking glasses with soap because the soap would give you the shits.
This didn’t apply to plates, silverware, pots etc. Just glasses.
And the glasses would go in the same greasy dishwater as everything else, so every beverage would have a little oil slick floating on top of it :eek:
On holidays my mother and aunts would chase her out of the kitchen to visit with the family, and re-wash everything they could get their hands on.
SHe also washed out and saved potato chip bags and paper towels, and refused to throw out spoiled food because wasting it was a sin. She grew up during the Depression and in hindsight I think she had a hoarding mentality to begin with.
My Nana used to sit there talking on and on about how she didn’t trust microwaves because they might give you cancer. And then she’d light another cigarette…
These days she has a microwave, and she hasn’t smoked since 1992. Yay Nan!
One grandmother wanted me to be sure and never borrow a black person’s comb, because it would greatly hurt our hair and the black person’s and we’d probably all have to shave our heads. (That’s just chemistry.)
The other had an unusual concern that my sister would “run off to the city and become a whore”. You’d have to know my sister to understand why this is a hysterical notion: when she was a teenager she was short and pimply and dumpy, and even after she blossomed she’s one of the shyest/most socially awkward/stranger-hating people on Earth, not to mention her high school valedictorian who only went on one date in high school and that because my mother arranged it with a guy who I’m pretty sure in hindsight was gayer than a frolicking baby zebra. But my grandmother warned of this many times.
This was a long time ago but my grandmother had a severe distrust when products in the market started to be rung up with UPC codes and bar code scanners. She was sure that it was impossible for a computer to see a price tag. This despite all evidence that it worked every time she went shopping.
Bowels.